Sons and Soldiers by Bruce Henderson

Author:Bruce Henderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

Staff Sergeant Stephan Lewy. (Family photograph)

Stephan was present for some of the briefings that Patton was given by the division staff. Whenever Patton was presented with various contingencies of a proposed plan of attack, his first question was always the same: “Which will give me the fewest casualties?”

Stephan’s team learned early on not to bother to unload the trailer they pulled behind their jeep. Unpacking was a waste of time because Patton’s army didn’t stay in any one place for long. His refrain to his commanders was constant: “You gotta get your mileage in for the day!” Stephan thought a lot about what made Patton a good general, and to him it boiled down to two primary factors: his concern for his troops and an aggressive philosophy that held it was better to attack first than to be attacked.

While Stephan conducted some interrogations—he was the only native German speaker on his OB team—his team’s primary job was to use the information obtained by the interrogators of the division’s IPW teams to identify which enemy units they were facing and determine their fighting capabilities. Their extensive knowledge of the German army was soon put to the test.

Brittany, like Normandy, was hedgerow country, and the hedges in the vicinity of Brest were particularly formidable. Earth embankments, often higher than six feet, were surrounded by trees and scrubs. In the final days of its drive on Brest, the 6th met a fierce and determined enemy. An estimated twenty thousand enemy troops were dug in to defend the port city. As the 6th positioned itself for the final assault, the staff car of a Nazi general decked out in a full-length leather coat drove headlong into the 6th’s field artillery battalion. The irate general tore open his tunic to bare his chest and said he would rather be shot than suffer the humiliation of being captured, but the Americans still took him prisoner. Though he refused to talk when he was interrogated, he was identified as Lieutenant General Karl Spang, the commander of Germany’s 266th Infantry Division.

From their OB book and more recent intelligence gathered from interrogations, Stephan’s team knew that the 266th had formed a year ago in Stuttgart, and had been stationed along the northern coast of Brittany. Some of its units fought in late June as the Allies broke out of their Normandy beachheads. Stephan and his team further determined from documents the captured general was carrying that the division was headed to Brest to help defend the port to the last man.

Based on this key piece of intelligence that a German division was to his rear, the 6th’s commander, Major General Robert Grow, changed his plan and canceled the attack on Brest. While keeping a light screen of forces facing Brest, he wheeled the rest of the division in an about-face, moved north in three combat columns, and struck the in-transit German division the next morning. The battle that followed was a complete success due to outflanking the surprised enemy with tanks and infantry led by hedge-cutting bulldozers plowing through the Brittany hedgerows.

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